It Was A Way Of Saying, ‘We Are In Control.’

I gathered so much great material for my WaPo story on female Freedom Riders that I figured I should put some of the best outtakes on Tumblr. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland was 19 when she was arrested on June 8, 1961. In the passages below, she sheds a little light on the involvement of Southern women vs. Northern women. (Joan is from Virginia.) She also elaborates on the vaginal searches she and other female Riders were subjected to once they were transferred to Mississippi’s Parchman Prison.

There weren’t many whites in the South who were openly involved in the movement because society was so against it. It was a good way to get run out of town. I remember with the sit-ins in North Carolina when I was at Duke University, girls in the dorm kept coming up and slipping us dollar bills to help out and express their moral support. But they couldn’t participate; they would endanger their families. Their daddies could lose their jobs.

I was a Southerner and already involved with the student movement and most of the black women were also Southern students, whereas most of the white women [had been] involved in sympathy pickets in the North. And in the mugshots, most of them look very freaked out and worn out. They were going into enemy territory and had no idea what to expect. They often had a hard time understanding the speech of the Southern demonstrators and officers, and they literally did not know what the food served them in jail was. [As for the rest of us], I wouldn’t quite say we were at home, but we knew what the score was and we understood the society. We didn’t like it but we understood it.

Joan was one of many women who were stripped naked by prison matrons and given vaginal searches with gloves dipped in Lysol or some other disinfectant.

We were stripped naked, given a shower and marched down to our cells with the [Parchman] gas chamber at the end of the cell block.

[One] Freedom Rider told me she had no memory of it but then she said ‘When I smell Lysol or Pine Sol that smell just gives me the chills.’ She felt she had suppressed the actual memory of the event but the smell brought it all back.

Another woman, a Jewish woman who is a little bit older than me, [told me] that the matron who was doing this was not comfortable doing it. But she couldn’t deal with coming back to the [Freedom Rider] reunion because it was so traumatic to be showered, stripped and searched, knowing that there were gas chambers at the end of the hall.

I think it’s important that our society realizes that this is not just folks in other parts of the world who do these sorts of things. It was psychological terrorism and intimidation, [a way of saying] ‘We are in control.’ I’m old enough now that I can talk about it calmly.

Notes

  1. jetamors reblogged this from annaholmes and added:
    (Trigger warning for… body cavity searches,
  2. outofthepale reblogged this from annaholmes
  3. lauraglu reblogged this from annaholmes
  4. minorjive reblogged this from annaholmes
  5. changetheratio reblogged this from annaholmes and added:
    fucking inspirational -...these women. Sorry for swearing. It felt called for.
  6. baconinabucket reblogged this from annaholmes
  7. annaholmes posted this